Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Saturday, March 28, 2009

(Readers: Please note that I’m posting my review of a book I just completed in lieu of a diary entry today. – Wanda)

An Immigrant ‘Three Times Over’ Looks Back

My Two Polish Grandfathers and Other Essays on the Imaginative Life
By Witold Rybczynski
Scribner. 228 pages. $25.00

For the children of immigrants to North America – especially those who hail from impoverished or war-torn corners of the world – the business of growing up can be nothing short of wrenching. Despite North America’s reputation as the “continent of immigrants,” the on-the-ground experience here for children of new arrivals is almost universally one of stereotyping, prejudice and identity crisis. On the one hand, children of immigrants are linked to their parents, a bond brought even closer due to their shared loss of a homeland and culture; on the other hand, every cell in their young bodies seems to cry out for assimilation, conformity and the chance to shake the shackles of the past. In some cases, the desire to rise above the obstacles to success is so powerful that it infuses those immigrant children with a kind of turbo-charged accelerant to excel.

The celebrated writer and architect Witold Rybczynski certainly falls into this camp, as he reveals in his graceful, understated new memoir, “My Two Polish Grandfathers.” Rybczynski was born in 1943 in Scotland to Polish parents who were serving the Allied cause during World War II, alongside a sizable contingent of exiled Poles. Later, at age 10, he migrated with his family to Quebec, Canada, thus becoming a Polish-Scottish-Canadian (and more recently, in the 1990s, an American). “I’m an immigrant three times over,” he writes in this collection of nine loosely structured essays. Rybczynski recalls that on his first day of school in Canada, “a fifth grade classmate pointed at my shorts and said, ‘Do you ever look stupid.’ I put away my shorts and cricket skills, and learned to wear blue jeans and play hockey. It took a little longer to lose my English accent, but eventually that, too, disappeared.”

His British persona proved easier to shed than his Polish identity, as he reveals in these essays centered on the growth of his imaginative life and powers, and the connection between his emergence as an architect and cultural historian and his forebears in Poland. Though his parents had made a conscious decision – first in Scotland and later in Canada — not to “impose their Polishness” on their sons, deciding “that my brother and I would be better off it we were not burdened with two cultures. I was not sent to Polish classes, or Polish Sunday school…. I had no Polish friends.” Still Rybczynski couldn’t escape his roots. “For one thing, I always spoke Polish with my parents.… We also ate different foods, barszcz (beet soup) and golabki (stuffed cabbage rolls)…. My parents continued the Polish custom of celebrating name days instead of birthdays. I always kissed my father on the cheek, not twice, as the French do, but three times, according to the Polish manner.”

Doubtless more influential than household customs was the legacy of his family’s colorful past. As a child, stories about the glory days in Poland came to young Witold in fairy-tale format, his mother as the displaced princess, his parents stripped of the life of privilege on which they had embarked after their marriage in 1937. Anchoring his family story is the achingly tragic story of Poland itself as the lost, righteous kingdom, overrun by the forces of evil – Nazis to the West, Soviets to the East – and finally betrayed by its allies, Britain and the United States, who expediently looked the other way as they allowed their unscrupulous ally, the Soviet Union, to have its murderous way with Poland. “When the yoke of Stalinism descended on Poland in 1948, he (Rybczynski’s father) took it for granted that we could never return.”

In the book’s third of nine essays, Rybczynski examines the lives of his two grandfathers, men markedly different in temperament and achievement. Rybczynski’s maternal grandfather, Mieczyslaw Jan Hofman, was a remarkable self-made man who “przed wojna” – before the War –had risen to become president of Bank Handlowy (Commerce Bank), Poland’s largest private bank. Hofman bought his family an elegant 1860 home in the nation’s capital – designed by an Italian architect for the leading Polish writer of the day – that stood near the famed Lazienki Gardens and behind Aleje Ujazdowskie, “Warsaw’s Champs-Elysees.”

However, the young Rybczynski was more drawn to the tragic, romantic and unorthodox tale of his paternal grandfather and namesake, Witold Erasmus Rybczynski, a mathematician and teacher who after marrying his wife and fathering a son, did the unthinkable. Shortly after World War I – just as the Polish nation had regained its independence after more than a century being partitioned – the elder Rybczynski fell in love with a married woman and abandoned his family to live out his life with her at her country estate in Galicia (formerly the Austrian section of Poland).

Though as a young man, Rybczynski was obsessed with jazz, the immigrants’ son could ill afford the luxury of pursuing something in which he might flounder or fail. While he dallied with hippie living after graduating from McGill, during his European sojourn on the Spanish island of Formentera, the period was short-lived. The immigrant’s son understood early that he would pursue a profession. And so, consciously or not, Rybczynski followed in the footsteps of his disciplined, hard-driving banker grandfather. Just as Mieczyslaw Hofman became Poland’s preeminent banker of the interwar years, his grandson went onto became an architectural icon in America. Paul Goldberger of The New York Times once opined that, “The most important legacy of the 1980s in architecture may not be a design at all, but a book… Witold Rybczynski’s ‘Home: A Short History of an Idea.’ ”

While “My Two Polish Grandfathers” may suffer from too slight an analysis of family history and the terrible events that shaped it, perhaps more than any of Rybczynski’s previous works, this memoir offers insight into one of the most trenchant thinkers of our time. His is the saga of arriving in a new land, seeing our built environment with the worldly eye of a newcomer – the immigrants’ son – and ultimately establishing a home for himself, his place in the world.